RSS Explosion in Chemistry and Science.

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Author: Vawter, Edward1

RSS (Really Simple Syndication) has been around for several years, but it has just begun to reach its potential. For those not familiar with RSS, it is basically a way to disseminate a list of regularly updated information. (For more detailed information on RSS, visit http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2002/12/18/dive-into-xml.html.)

In this column, I will focus on RSS feeds furnished by sites themselves and not with search results that can be provided via RSS. That's another article for another time. If your browser supports RSS, then you can easily view the results within your browser and add the URL to your bookmarks. Otherwise, you'll have to copy the URL by right clicking (or control clicking on a Mac) and copying the URL to your favorite RSS reader. The screen shots in this article all come from Apple's Safari 2.0.2, a browser that handles RSS feeds quite well. For Windows users, Microsoft's latest version of Internet Explorer (version 7, still in beta at press time) does support RSS. To download the new upgrade, go to http://www.microsoft.com/windows/IE/ie7/default.mspx.

RSS is an excellent tool for keeping current in your area of interest. It allows you to quickly sift through a large amount of information to find items of interest. Combine this with the ability of some RSS readers to search within feeds and you have a powerful weapon for keeping current and staying on top of critical information.

Two organizations have recently added RSS feeds: the American Chemical Society (ACS) and the Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC). Both have added the tables of contents for all of their journals as RSS feeds. The ACS list of feeds [http://pubs.acs.org/alerts/rss/index.html] includes feeds from all 34 ACS journals, while the RCS list [http://www.rsc.org/Publishing/Technology/rss.asp] has 22 feeds. Both organizations have had an e-mail service delivering the tables of contents for journals for some time, but having the ability to browse the table of contents via an RSS feed is a welcome addition. I like to feel I had a little to do with this, since I participated in a focus group at a recent ACS National Meeting, where I heavily lobbied for the addition of RSS feeds to many areas.

The feeds from the ACS show the title of the article, the authors, the Web release date, and a linked DOI number. (DOI refers to digital object identifiers -- see http://www.doi.org for more information.) I am somewhat disappointed that the society doesn't include a short abstract or a graphical abstract in the feed. (A graphical abstract is particularly important in the sciences because it can display nontext characters and symbols, such as chemical structures, mathematical equations, formulas, etc.) Using the DOI link does provide a graphical abstract, but it would be easier if it were included in the feed itself. It helps that clicking on either "Read more" or the title (depending on your RSS reader) gives you the full abstract from the ACS publications Web site. The site includes much more information, including an abstract and a graphical abstract where available.

Figure 1 shows a screen shot for a portion of a recent issue of the Journal of Organic Chemistry. Clicking on the DOI link takes you to the abstract on the ACS publications Web site, as shown in Figure 2.

In addition to all of its journals, the ACS has added RSS feeds for the chemistry.org newsletters Heart Cut and Patent Watch. Heart Cut is a synopsis of interesting and important articles in the chemical literature, and Patent Watch keeps track of important and interesting patents. I personally have used these sources for several years, but I found myself lax in making regular visits to the Web site to keep up. With the RSS feed, I can check to see what's new without having to load the page and check for an update. These other ACS feeds have limited utility too, since they only provide a very small clip of each article (usually only the first sentence).

I personally dislike limiting RSS feeds to very small clips. It makes it much more difficult to determine if an item is of enough interest to deserve reading the whole piece. The rationale from most RSS providers for only having a snippet is that they want to use the RSS feeds to drive traffic to their Web sites. While I can see this if the Web site survives on ads for revenue, it doesn't make much sense in regard to the ACS.

The RSC is the U.K. equivalent of the ACS. It also has added all its journal titles as RSS feeds. The RSC has taken a much more liberal view toward RSS feeds, however; it makes both the text and graphical abstracts within the feeds available.

A portion of the RSS feed for Chemical Communications appears in Figure 3. Clicking on "Read more…" gives the abstract shown in Figure 4.

Another interesting link provided by RSC is a TagCloud of its RSS feeds [http://www.tagcloud.com/cloud/html/RSC%5fRSS/default/250]. TagCloud [http://www.tagcloud.com] is a Web service based on Yahoo! Search that allows a cloud of most common keywords to be shown (see Figure 5 on page 36). When you click on one of these keywords, you get a list of the articles containing that keyword. I find this feature very helpful. Clicking on "aldehyde" in the above tagcloud gives the result shown in Figure 6 on page 36.

Additionally, when you click on the "Search Related Info" button, the TagCloud keywords associated with that article are searched within Yahoo!, and a variety of results are returned. In the above example, the words "carbonyl compounds," "aldol," "alpha," and "aldehydes" are searched. You can change terms by selecting or deselecting in the checkboxes for keyword searches. The result of clicking on this button appears in Figure 7 on page 36.

Other RSS feeds allow you to keep current with U.S. patents. These do not come from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, but they do update regularly. The feeds listed at http://www.freepatentsonline.com/rssfeed.html cover RSS feeds for all the patent classes, as well as some of the popular feeds at the top of the page. This is convenient if you only want to keep track of certain classes of patents.

Many other science-and chemistry-related organizations, such as the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), Nature Publishing Group, Science, Dialog, Biomed Central, IEEE Computer Society, the American Physical Society, and the American Institute of Physics, have RSS feeds. The FDA [http://www.fda.gov] has several feeds to choose from, including ones covering news releases, recalls, patient safety news, and so forth. No comprehensive list of feeds seems to exist, but two sites -- http://www.fda.gov/oc/rss/default.htm and http://www.fda.gov/cdrh/rss.html -- can get you started. These are a great way to monitor news and information coming out of the FDA. I do wish that the FDA would add RSS feeds for its weekly e-mail on new information posted to the Center for Drug Research and Evaluation (CDER) site. I'd also like a feed for a new regulatory guidance documents.

Nature Publishing Group, publishers of Nature and other magazines, has also incorporated RSS to allow patrons to see what has been published in its journals. The feeds can be found at http://npg.nature.com/npg/servlet/Content?data=xml/02%5fnewsfeed.xml%26style=xml/02%5fnewsfeed.xsl. They include an OPML (Outline Processor Markup Language) file of all the feeds in one file; you can import it into your favorite RSS reader. There are a total of 61 feeds, including four feeds that contain job listings.

Science magazine, which is published by the American Association for the Advancement of Science, has an RSS feed [http://www.sciencemag.org/rss/current.xml] that covers the current issue, as well as one for the news service Sciencenow [http://sciencenow.sciencemag.org/rss/current.xml].

Dialog Corp. [http://www.dialog.com/] has two useful RSS feeds: one for press releases and another for changes to its Bluesheets [http://www.dialog.com/rss/]. If you use Dialog and want to keep up-to-date with changes to the Dialog databases, then this feed is for you.

The content of Biomed Central [http://www.biomedcentral.com/] is available through RSS feeds. A list of nine available feeds appears at http://www.biomedcentral.com/info/about/rss/. However, any journal from Biomed Central can be accessed via RSS by adding /rss/ to the end of its URL. If you add /mostviewed/rss/ to the end of a journal's URL, it gives you the most often viewed articles in each of those journals. Don't worry about editing URLs yourself. You only need to go to the journal of interest to find an orange button with the letters "XML"; that will take you to the RSS feed. To get the most frequently viewed articles in an RSS feed, go to the journal of interest and, in the left column, choose "most viewed." The resulting page will have an orange button that allows you to view the RSS feed in your browser or to copy and paste the link into your favorite RSS reader.

Chemistry and Biology Online [http://www.chembiol.com/] has RSS feeds for all 10 of the Cell Press journals [http://www.chembiol.com/misc/page?page=feeds]. Happily, it offers an OPML file with all the feeds in one file. This allows you to import them all at once rather than add each one individually. Most RSS readers allow you to choose which ones to add to your reader without having to add them all.

Eurekalert [http://www.eurekalert.org/rss.php], a part of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, has grouped its RSS feeds into 19 subject areas, including one for Chemistry, Physics, and Material Sciences. Some others cover breaking news from all groups, including atmospheric science, science business, and earth science. The feeds, while not carrying the full article, do have more than enough to allow you to decide if you wish to read an article.

RSS feeds are a very important tool for staying current with journals today, especially given the explosion in the amount of scientific and technical information being published. Most of the major chemistry journals and many other science publications now make available their tables of contents in a manner that actually makes it a pleasure to view.

Some other science organizations offer the tables of contents for their journals via RSS. These Web pages contain lists of RSS feeds, not the feeds themselves.

American Physical Society
http://feeds.aps.org/

American Institute of Physics
http://www.aip.org/rss.html

Quarterly Journal of Mathematics
http://qjmath.oxfordjournals.org/rss/index.dtl

IEEE Computer Society
http://www.computer.org/portal/cms%5fdocs%5fcs/csdl/
jsp/rss/index.jsp?content=yes

Institute of Physics
http://syndication.iop.org/?list=cat

Special Libraries Association, Division of Physics, Astronomy,
and Mathematics
http://www.sla.org/division/dpam/subjects/phys.html

PHOTO (BLACK & WHITE): Figure 1. RSS feed of J. Org. Chem. in Safari browser

PHOTO (BLACK & WHITE): Figure 2. J. Org. Chem. abstract from the RSS feed

PHOTO (BLACK & WHITE): Figure 3. RSS feed of Chem. Commun. in Safari browser

PHOTO (BLACK & WHITE): Figure 4. Abstract from the RSS feed

PHOTO (BLACK & WHITE): Figure 5. TagCloud of Royal Society of Chemistry's Advanced Articles

PHOTO (BLACK & WHITE): Figure 6. Results of clicking on "aldehyde" from the Royal Society of Chemistry's TagCloud

PHOTO (BLACK & WHITE): Figure 7. Results of clicking on "Search Related Info" button

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By Edward Vawter, President, QD Information Services LLC